Streaming lullabies with a Raspberry Pi Zero

Bedtime Music

When a much-loved stereo bites the dust, a Raspberry Pi Zero fills in.

When my wife was young, she bought what must have been a pretty cool radio, CD, and dual cassette player stereo (Figure 1). The stereo worked well during her youth and her college years, and once we were married, she let the children listen to it.

Eventually, age began to catch up with this venerable system. First the cassette players stopped working, then the CD player would only play intermittently, and finally the tuner just stopped over the holidays.

My children like to listen to music as they are falling asleep, so I set out to look for a replacement. With so much music available on the Internet, I thought their radio could be replaced by a computer, which would offer extra flexibility because I could control it from my laptop. The computer could be scheduled to shutdown after the kids were asleep, rather than staying on all night.